Science Fiction for Old Farts

HUGO AWARDS VOTING DEADLINE ONE WEEK AWAY

If you’re planning on attending Denvention – the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention – NOW is the time to purchase your membership.

Voting for the Hugo Awards ends in a week, and only members of the World Science Fiction Society are eligible to vote. (You become a member of WSFS by purchasing a membership at the Denvention 3 site; you are actually purchasing a WSFS annual membership, which entitles you to attend the convention and vote on the awards.)

Attending memberships (you get into the convention) are $200. Supporting memberships (convertible to Attending status by paying the additional fee) are $50.

Make a science fiction author, editor or artist happy. By voting you help insure that SF authors, artists and editors get to take home a model of a really nifty rocketship, one they can strategically place in their domicile and wait for guests and visitors to ask the inevitable “what’s that?” question. After all, we know they need an excuse to talk about themselves…

Image courtesy Michael Benveniste (he did most of the award photos at The Hugo Awards site, along with Sheila Perry and Cheryl Morgan) from the Noreascon 4 website. Credit information courtesy of Deb Geisler

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The photo you have is the basic rocket that goes on all of the Hugo Award trophies. Each year’s trophies are a bit different. Here is the Noreascon Four trophy. (I think it’s one of the spiffiest, but I’m a tad biased.)

If you’d like to see all of the trophies or get additional information about the Hugo Awards, you might wish to visit thehugoawards.org, an official web site of the World Science Fiction Society.

Thanks. I’m familair with the tradition of each Con desiging their own Hugo award and using the basic rocket. It did take folks a bit to settle on it though. If I remember correctly (and there’s a good chance I don’t, see today’s entry), the original rocket was either built up from or cast using a hood ornament (something about needing to model in the fourth fin is tickling at my memory).

Noreascon 4’s award is most definitely spiffy.

Me, I’d like to see any old Hugo on my mantle – even a used one with someone else’s name scratched out…

Well, there is the way I got my trophy — co-chaired a Worldcon from which we had two spare trophies. (Sensible committees always commission more trophies than they actually need to account for breakage. In fact, in 2002 we weren’t able to assemble every trophy on the day — one of them had be re-tapped later — so it was good that we had spares.) But the Former Worldcon Chair route isn’t the recommended route.

You’re right about it taking some time to settle on design. The current rocket design dates to 1984 — the “Peter Weston” design, on account of Pete having the molds made for the casting factory he owned at the time. The full story of the rocket’s evolution is complex, and as you can see by going through the photo archive, the rocket has evolved over the years before settling in on the Weston version.

Too bad Pete didn’t add in a ‘mini hugo’ to the mold when he was making it – I’d bet a lot of fans would buy them.

From other manufacturing experience, I know that molds can cost big time, and having a molded part is one good hedge against frequent changes to the design.

Speaking of IP – is there protection of that design, or just for the name?

Probably have to get a design patent for it, and, while relatively inexpensive (as patents go), they really only have a decent degree of robustness in limited applications. If there isn’t one currently, the design would have to change to be eligible for a grant; on the other hand, its been around long enough to have a good degree of trade dress attached to it, but on the remaining hand, that ‘style’ of rocket is pretty iconic, so someone could make a decent argument that its way too common…

Pete has a slide show about the production process. There’s only one mold, and producing the 20-25 trophies/year we need is a fairly slow, manual process. That’s why they cost something like $100 (or was it £100?) each. Personally, I worry about there only being one mold and no backup of which I’m aware. And Pete sold the factory a few years ago when he retired, although of course we still buy the rockets from that factory; it’s specialty work for them.

Interesting that you mention legal protection. The Mark Protection Committee has been kicking around the idea of applying for service mark protection for the trophy design. We just have not pursued it, partially on account of my not making enough of an attempt to get the attention of our IP attorney. We expect that if we were to get protection, it would be relatively narrow.

As it happens, we started accumulating photos of all the old trophies (part of the Hugo Awards web site) because of the need to be able to prove to the US Patent & Trademark Office that the design of the rocket (not the trophy overall) is stable and consistent.